Plans to Improve Article Mode

Okay, I can’t leave well enough alone. I’ve spent around two hours writing my article mode. This has (depending on your point of view), either wasted two hours, or saved $19.95 (for an alternative tool). Now I’m about to pour countless hours more of my already scarce free time into perfecting the tool. Um, hooray?

First things first. It is probably a good idea to have a plan where I am going with this. So, which additional features do I want? The first problem is that my workflow is inefficient. I spend far too long going from article to HTML.

I use muse and htmlize for my HTML generation. However, htmlize is not currently compatible with Emacs23 (and I love the beautiful fonts). Therefore, I have been writing my articles in article mode and then switching to Emacs22 to generate the HTML. Pretty darn slow. Fortunately it is easy to fix. There is a patched version of htmlize that works with Emacs23. And a sigh of relief was heard all round.

The next thing to do, as has been commented on, is to port article mode to a minor mode so it can co-exist with muse. After that, which additional features would I like?

• One-key HTML generation would be handy.
• It would be nice to be able to count the words just in the active region.
• I should have some form of grammar analysis available.
• I would like to have some default empty templates, maybe with my bio at the bottom of the article.
• The fixed window at the bottom of the article is inflexible. Might it be worth changing this to some form of floating frame à la speedbar?

I also considered incorporating kind of article spinning tool but I don’t think I agree with the idea of generating lots of similar articles so I won’t be facilitating that.

I’ll be blogging about updates tothe article writer over the next few posts. Does anyone have any suggestions for additions to the perfect article writing tool?